The present invention relates to digital communication and more particularly to a space-time communication system.
The ability to communicate through wireless media is made difficult by the inherent characteristics of how transmitted signals propagate through the environment. A communication signal transmitted through a transmitter antenna element travels along multiple paths to the receiving antenna element. Depending on many factors including the signal frequency and the terrain, the paths along which the signal travels will exhibit different attenuation and propagation delays. This results in a communication channel which exhibits fading and delay spread.
It is well known that adaptive spatial processing using multiple antenna arrays increases the communications quality of wireless systems. Adaptive array processing is known to improve bit error rate, data rate, or spectral efficiency in a wireless communication system. The prior art provides for methods involving some form of space-time signal processing at either the input to the channel, the output to the channel, or both. The space-time processing step is typically accomplished using an equalization structure wherein the time domain equalizer tap settings for a multitude of antennas are simultaneously optimized. This so-called xe2x80x9cspace-time equalizationxe2x80x9d leads to high signal processing complexity if the delay spread of the equivalent digital channel is substantial.
There is prior art teaching the use of conventional antenna beams or polarizations to create two or more spatially isolated communication channels between a transmitter and a receiver, but only under certain favorable conditions. The radiation pattern cross talk between different physical transmit and receive antenna pairs must provide sufficient spatial isolation to create two or more substantially independent communication channels. This can lead to stringent manufacturing and performance requirements on the physical antenna arrays as well as the receiver and transmitter electronics. In addition, when large objects in the wireless propagation channel cause multipath reflections, the spatial isolation provided by the prior art between any two spatial subchannels can be severely degraded, thus reducing communication quality.
What is needed is a system for more effectively taking advantage of multiple transmitter antennas and/or multiple receiver antennas to ameliorate the deleterious effects of he inherent characteristics of wireless media.
The present invention provides a space-time signal processing system with advantageously reduced complexity. The system may take advantage of multiple transmitter antenna elements and/or multiple receiver antenna elements, or multiple polarizations of a single transmitter antenna element and/or single receiver antenna element. The system is not restricted to wireless contexts and may exploit any channel having multiple inputs or multiple outputs and certain other characteristics. In certain embodiments, multi-path effects in a transmission medium cause a multiplicative increase in capacity.
One wireless embodiment operates with an efficient combination of a substantially orthogonalizing procedure (SOP) in conjunction with a plurality of transmitter antenna elements with one receiver antenna element, or a plurality of receiver antenna elements with one transmit antenna element, or a plurality of both transmitter and receiver antenna elements. The SOP decomposes the time domain space-time communication channel that may have inter symbol interference (ISI) into a set of parallel, space-frequency, SOP bins wherein the ISI is substantially reduced and the signal received at a receiver in one bin of the SOP is substantially independent of the signal received in any other bin of the SOP. A major benefit achieved thereby is that the decomposition of the ISI-rich space time channel into substantially independent SOP bins makes it computationally efficient to implement various advantageous spatial processing techniques embodied herein. The efficiency benefit is due to the fact that the total signal processing complexity required to optimize performance in all of the SOP bins is often significantly lower than the processing complexity required to jointly optimize multiple time domain equalizes.
Another benefit is that in many types of wireless channels where the rank of the matrix channel that exist between the transmitter and the receiver within each SOP bin is greater than one, the combination of an SOP with spatial processing can be used to efficiently provide multiple data communication subchannels within each SOP bin. This has the desirable effect of essentially multiplying the spectral data efficiency of the wireless system. A further feature is the use of spatial processing techniques within each transmitter SOP bin to reduce radiated interference to unintentional receivers. A still further feature is the ability to perform spatial processing within each receiver SOP bin to reduce the deleterious effects of interference from unintentional transmitters.
One advantageous specific embodiment for the SOP is to transmit with IFFT basis functions and receive with FFT basis functions. This particular SOP is commonly referred to as discrete orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), and each SOP bin is thus associated with a frequency bin. This embodiment enhances OFDM with the addition of efficient spatial processing techniques.
According to the present invention, space-frequency processing may adaptively create substantially independent spatial subchannels within each SOP bin even in the presence of significant cross talk interference between two or more physical transmit and receive antenna pairs. A further advantage is that the space-frequency processing can advantageously adapt to cross talk interference between the physical antenna pairs even if this cross-talk is frequency dependent, or time varying, or both. Thus, the present invention may provide two or more substantially independent communication channels even in the presence of severe multipath and relatively poor physical antenna radiation pattern performance.
A further understanding of the nature and advantages of the inventions herein may be realized by reference to the remaining portions of the specification and the attached drawings.